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For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.
Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted.
Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution.
Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.
Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain
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Cornelia Funke (Inkheart (Inkworld, #1))
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For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,
Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.
Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted.
Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy,
Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution.
Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.
When at last he goeth to his final punishment,
Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]
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Nicholas A. Basbanes (A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books)
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She liked to compare Polygon Plaza to a monastery: a place where the dissolution of the self produced moments of astonishing self-expression.
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Esther Yi (Y/N)
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On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses. “For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,” one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever. Even a worldly skeptic, with a strong craving for what he had in his hands, might have hesitated before slipping such a book into his cloak.
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Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)
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Bolsover Priory was founded in the reign of Henry the Sixth, about the beginning of the eleventh century. Hugh de Bolsover had accompanied that monarch to the Holy Land, in the expedition undertaken by way of penance for the murder of his young nephews in the Tower. Upon the dissolution of the monasteries, the veteran was enfeoffed in the lands and manor, to which be gave his own name of Bowlsover, or Bee-owls-over, (by corruption Bolsover) — a Bee in chief, over three Owls, all proper, being the armorial ensigns borne by this distinguished crusader at the siege of Acre.
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Thomas Ingoldsby (The Ingoldsby Legends (illustrated))
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The Peasants’Revolt resulted in the first Act against begging in 1381, not followed until the anti-vagrancy measures of 1547 after the dissolution of the monasteries. As homelessness increased with the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution, so did legislation. Then in 1744 the Vagrancy Act laid the template for all legislation that has followed. It categorized homeless people as ‘beggars, idle, vagabonds and rogues’, and designated repeat offenders in the previous categories as incorrigible rogues’. This gave the authorities the right to arrest anyone whom they believed to be suspicious, or without means to sustain themselves.
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Raynor Winn (The Salt Path)
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For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails … and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain T
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Cornelia Funke (Inkheart / Inkspell / Inkdeath (The Inkheart Trilogy #1-3))
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Even in this sphere, he remarked, the lure of easy money was becoming “a moral temptation, and the scramble for German property has been not unlike a Californian gold rush, or the distribution of the spoils which followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
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R.M. Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War)
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The reign of Elizabeth I had conferred this right, as a way of dealing with the epidemic of begging that followed the dissolution of the monasteries.
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Theodore Dalrymple (Our Culture, What's Left Of It)
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In a monastery fish pond.’ He crossed to the door and closed it carefully, before laying the
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C.J. Sansom (Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1))
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The dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture was another step that altered the balance of power in rural England. The slow growth in the real incomes of the English peasantry before the beginning of the industrial era was a consequence of this type of drift.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity)
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Mr. Johns, for it was he, had come into the drawing-room to write his letters because the library was full of Professor Milward and the archdeacon arguing about Neville de Pomfret who, having benefited largely by the dissolution of the monasteries, had subsequently died in a very sudden way, his death being attributed by his friends to poison administered by an ex-abbot disguised as an apothecary, and by his enemies to the Wrath of God which had caused him to indulge in intemperance of every kind to his own destruction.
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Angela Thirkell (Pomfret Towers (Barsetshire, #6))